Cloud News & Articles

The will-we-won’t-we debate over the deployment of Cloud-based solutions continues. This time its Cloud technology consultancy Saugatuck’s (news, site) turn arguing in their latest report that while it is inevitable that enterprises will take to the Cloud, it is effective management of  Cloud deployments that will make it successful or not.

Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month at what the various open source CMS projects are up to. But rather than blindly putting out an update for January, we thought we'd look farther ahead into what everyone wants to accomplish throughout next year. Call it our open source 2010 predictions with less guesswork and high hopes.

IBM (news, site) has been braving the strong winds of the analytics industry lately, trying to propose a better way of managing unstructured and structured content in combination with analytics used for business intelligence and more insight into web content.

Several new analytics offerings were released as a result, including IBM Cognos Content Analytics and IBM InfoSphere Content Assessment.

IBM Smart Analytics Cloud (and more investment) is the latest one to be released as part of the new service line -- IBM Business Analytics and Optimization Services.

Does fear of Google downtime haunt your company? Keep those docs safe, but widely accessible, with Gladinet's cloud desktop solution.

It's no surprise that HTML 5 is coming. However, it's been a bit easier to miss that a lot of work has also been going into the issue of Web forms.

So much so, that the HTML Working Group has announced that Web Forms 2.0 have been superseded by HTML 5.

Following this week’s Windows Azure announcement by Microsoft, the ball was in the competition’s court. And Yahoo! responded with a cloud-related announcement of its own.

Yahoo! announced that it will offer the Zimbra Collaboration Suite as a hosted solution for educational institutions. According to Zimbra, over 500 schools are already using Zimbra. This hosted solution is currently available exclusively to .edu’s. Who knows — maybe, if all goes well, the solution will expand its wings beyond the .edu market.

Whatever ‘Web 2.0’ is or was, few organizations have lived and breathed the term as much as Zoho. Bringing office applications into the cloud for commercial and personal use is the most obvious example of this, but equally notable is all the hidden strategic and operational stuff which has brought Zoho, as of last week, to the landmark figure of one million users.

KnowledgeTree and CorraTech have partnered to go out into the big wide world and promote open source document management software.

KnowledgeTree provides an open source document management product for small to medium sized businesses. CorraTech provides open source system integration, consulting and outsourcing services. They will work together to sell KnowledgeTree’s software throughout North America and Europe.

JustSystems is hosting a complimentary webinar called “Fast-track Single Sourcing: The Road to DITA Success,” part of its XML Advisor Webinar series.

The event takes place on Thursday, 25 October at 1 PM Eastern. Attendees will learn how to build a business case for the Darwin Information Type Architecture (DITA), currently the standard for XML-based and single-source (a.k.a. component) content management.

You’ll also learn how to define topic templates, conditional text and metadata; considerations for specialization and training end users; and how to customize DITA output or create a tool checklist.

Lots of handy-dandy stuff. Register here.

The best thing governments can do on the Web is get out of the way. Save the citizen time by making basic government tasks fast and easy.

All the twists, turns and tips you need for staying up-to-date by the water cooler.

This week’s highlights include:

• Kentico’s ASP.NET Web CMS Gets Social Makeover. Praying for the kindness of strangers? Look no further.
• SharePoint Light: Live and SaaSy, Lacking Depth. Microsoft “responds” to the hosted threats to its Office Suite.
• Case Study: Discovering Plone Content Management System (Part 1). Here’s to getting to know Plone a bit better.
• Proximic Enables Monetization for Web Publishers. Proximic takes on contextual advertising.
• Gartner Conjures Up Another Enterprise CMS Magic Quadrant. Le quadrant magique. Yummy.

And these are the articles you couldn’t get enough of (if unique visits are anything to go by, anyway). It’s never too late to get smart about improving web content!

• Getting Started with SharePoint (MOSS) 2007
• Killer Web Content Examples
• Open Text Gets DoD Cert for eDOCS RM
• My Web Content is Better Than Your Web Content
• Open Text Connects Dots of User Generated Content

Zoho Start is a relatively new start page/integrated console that marries all Zoho apps in a single view. It currently works with Zoho Show, Writer and Sheet, with other apps to come.

Download Squad wryly writes, “Thanks Zoho, for making it extra difficult to choose between Zoho’s suite of applications, and Google’s Docs/Apps.” This isn’t the first time in recent months it’s done so. Less than a fortnight ago Zoho used Google Gears to bring its suite offline, something Google itself hasn’t opted to do.

That was neat. But unless you’re already a Zoho user, it’s hard to see how Zoho Start will draw Google Apps users into the Zoho camp.

Perhaps perceiving this, Center Networks thinks Zoho should go the extra mile and create a full start page, with the ability to include syndicated content.

The few things that have eluded the online word — as opposed to the infamous written word of yesteryear — are metrics of validity and accuracy, and the grail of a referenceable reputation.

With so many sites and so many people wanting to consume and interact, we never really can be sure whose version of what is most accurate. Somehow, it was all so much easier to believe when it was published in print.